The fear It has been the subject of fascination and study by the scientific community throughout the centuries. All involved in a permanent struggle to try to decipher the origin of the panic.
It is a fact that fear exists and can unleash a wide range of reactions in human beings, from outright fright to a twisted kind of euphoric emotion.
It is not in vain that there are rituals and customs such as Halloween or horror and horror films and literature that revolve around experiencing this sensation and living the experience of its induction under fixed and therefore relatively safe parameters.
But fear goes beyond that simplicity and a group of scientists have devoted all their strength to finally deciphering how it originates. Today, at last, we have a disturbing breakthrough.
This is the molecule of fear
It so happens that a group of international researchers has just published in the latest edition of the journal Cell reports a study in which to decipher the molecular process that gives rise to fear in the brain, all after reacting to certain external stimuli.
The key molecule in the study is called CGRP and would be the one that allows neurons to group threatening sensory signals into a single unified signal.
Although these neurons are in different regions of the brain, the signal unification process happens and these grouped signals from there pass to the amygdala, which translates them as fear:
“The brain pathway that we detected functions as a central alarm system. We were excited to discover that CGRP neurons are activated by negative sensory signals from all five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. “
It is what points out Sung Han, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the Clayton Foundation Peptide Biology Laboratories of the Salk Institute (California, USA), who focused the project on reading and interpreting this type of multisensory signals.
The previous paradigm conceived of fear as originating from multiple signals, but now the presence of the CGRP molecule essentially defines fear as a molecular process.
To test this, the scientists used a group of genetically modified mice, which they equipped with a small device to determine the signal flow of CGRP neurons based on calcium fluxes after reacting to different stimuli in their environment.
The rodents were confronted with threatening stimuli, such as knocking, thunderous sounds and simulated bird attacks. In the end, the activity of 160 CGRP neurons was recorded to increase precisely when the mouse was confronted with those fear stimuli.
So CGRP neurons are needed to form the signals and memories of the threats themselves. Fear is therefore molecular.